Upgrading Vault 2009 – 2015

Upgrading Vault 2009 – 2015

Recently we did an upgrade of a 2009 Vault database up to 2015. Easy right??

I quickly searched on the Google for upgrading Autodesk Vault and came up with a document detailing how to upgrade the Vault with regards to SQL and the database.

After reading, it looked pretty easy but when trying we met a few bumps along the road of which I am going to give a quick rundown of, what happened and how we overcame these little bumps.

The first thing to note is that you cannot just upgrade straight from 2009 to 2015. You need to jump in versions of 2 so we first had to go to 2011 and then 2013 and then 2015.

So the first thing to do is backup the existing 2009 Vault. We then created a test environment on a virtual machine and installed Vault Server 2011. We did a restore and got stuck on one of the libraries. It was the ANSI library. So back to backing up the 2009 Vault but this time we excluded the libraries.

Restoring went through first time 🙂

Once this was done we had to install the 2013 Vault Server. Before installing you need to first upgrade the SQL Server express 2008 SP1 up to SQL Server express 2008 SP2 or SP3. So we scoured the internet for the install but we could not find anything that would upgrade this silly SQL up to SP3. Then light shone out of the sky. Why don’t we just install SQL Server express 2008 R2 SP1. It is supported and lo and behold it worked!!!

The last step is going to be taken on a new server so that is going to be a straight 2015 Vault server install with the latest service packs and then a restore of the backup we created of the 2013 Vault database and everything is up and running.